ABSTRACT
Being future-oriented in an action-driven environment, few professional planners acknowledge in their day-to-day work the individual and collective inheritances from planning history that are the foundation of their expertise. Nor do they consciously take note of two core characteristics of a profession: possessing a body of knowledge (or expertise) vetted by current peers, and having a means of transferring that knowledge to the next generation of practitioners. (The third component of a profession, adhering to a code of ethics, will not be treated in this chapter.) Instead, they simply describe their practices as part art and part science.
